We believe that the new and necessary workplace culture change must start with an honest exploration. In yesterday’s article – a Checklist to help the handful of willing organisations get started on integrating, rewarding and valuing the human work so they can lower their HumanDebt and be competitive in this new landscape.
Today’s video finds Ffion Jones and myself discussing what it is that holds organisations back from accessing and applying the knowledge that would help transform their culture.
The main culprit? The resistance to the human work that we often discuss in our work. While it may have many causes from the systemic disdain for mental and emotional wellbeing in the workplace to the lack of respect for people as capital and not “resources”, its biggest present component is tied to our collective state of mind which is, in its overwhelming majority, disengaged and burnt-out.
What we maintain is that before any organisation can move forward, they must first assess how prevalent this state of mind is amongst their staff because if it is a generalised state of affairs this constitutes a de facto state of emergency and the levels of stress and unease it brings, will make the natural resistance to the human work even greater.
Each and every one of the many “trendy” terms connected to the big changes in the workplace from “The Great Resignation” to “Quiet Quitting” and even “Productivity Paranoia” is traceable to this same root cause: a crisis of well-being translating into generalised active disengagement and burnout exacerbated by a generalised lack of EQ and the absence of practice to communicate about emotions and better behaviours.
While “quiet quitting” and its further step, “the great resignation” are manifestations of this crisis at every employee’s level, the newly coined phenomenon of “productivity paranoia” is the way this crisis manifests itself at the leadership level. Leaders too, from middle managers to CxOs are burned out and disengaged and that makes them fearful, mistrusting paranoid and clinging to command and control.
How do we reverse it? Replacing the status quo with care – for self and those around us; increasing EQ; valuing and encouraging human connection; reaffirming purpose and igniting passion; refocusing on psychologically safe teams; zoning in on true flexibility that makes genuine personal sense; and instituting a practice of both individual and team level human work that keeps empathy, respect, self-improvement, agency and growth at the core of the new mindset. Cultural change aka diminishing or even eradicating the existent HumanDebt by distributing the work to the edges – the people themselves – aka the Human Work and integrating it into the day-to-day.
Make no mistake about it, when history looks back, none of the winners would have escaped the exploration. No one who didn’t acknowledge the fundamental change towards humanity that the workplace is undergoing today would have remained on top. Many burned-out and disengaged paranoid command and control middle managers will be hoping none of this hard honest audit really needs happening and they will do all they can to avoid it but even they will have to come around to the reality that we need to eliminate the resistance to the human work to take the next step. Their own included.
The catch-22 is that our current workplace culture doesn’t support the human work but the human work is the only one that can genuinely change the current culture so there’s nothing for it than to roll our sleeves. All of us. Everyone says they have no time, no tools, no knowledge, no permission and no reward. These objections are paradoxically both true facts and imaginary excuses depending on how you want to look at them. Let’s confine them to the latter and get going on this big piece of work so that we can overcome this crisis and then settle in the promised land of the new workplace path of flexibility, happiness and high performance.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.
“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link